


Required to Bear

by MiaCooper



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Adult Content, Angst, Character Study, Destructive Behavior, Episode: s05e10 Counterpoint, F/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Series, Pre-Series, Rape/Non-con Elements, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-04
Updated: 2017-09-04
Packaged: 2018-12-20 08:15:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11916837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiaCooper/pseuds/MiaCooper
Summary: Sometimes the past defines the future. And sometimes, no matter how defining your past, you can begin anew.





	1. Red Lipstick and Dark Shadows

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to SerenLyall, Helen8462, Caladenia and LittleObsessions for the inspiration and the feedback. This is for you.
> 
>  **Disclaimer**  
>  Paramount/CBS own all rights to the _Voyager_ universe and its characters, which I am borrowing without permission or intent to profit. Jeri Taylor’s rights to ownership of her novel _Mosaic_ is not in question, and my slightly-skewed interpretation of events and characters depicted in that book are not intended to infringe those rights.

* * *

  
  
She gave her heart away that night with drunken kisses and dizzy eyes.  
She kissed more liquor bottles than lips and she felt so alive yet misused.  
She stumbled with the world toppling over her shoulders and the deadline hanging over her head.  
She had a bomb in her chest and she was ready to set it off.  
Days filled with coffee stained lips and empty smiles wandered off that night.  
She craved kisses like a desperate lover and jumping off cliffs didn’t seem so frightening anymore.  
Red lipstick sucked out of her lips and dark shadows enveloped her eyes and cheeks.  
She was wild. She was free. She was a walking disaster filled with catastrophe.  
\- [jwfeelings](http://jwfeelings.tumblr.com/)  
  


* * *

  
  
_USS La Recherche, 2390_  
  
“Are you coming to bed?”  
  
When she drags her gaze up from the padd detailing the draft treaty, her husband is leaning in the doorway with nonchalance she knows is feigned. She smiles in a way she hopes is gentle and gives him comfort.  
  
“I’ll be in soon.”  
  
“Okay.” He waits a moment, and she pretends not to feel his eyes on her, before he retreats to their bedroom.  
  
They are three days out from Devore Prime, and all of her fears have just been realised.  
  


* * *

  
  
_USS Voyager, 2375_  
  
It takes everything she has to quell her trembling as the Devore bastard strips away her uniform. She watches it drop to the floor. Red and black, and black again.  
  
The air in her ready room is dense with expectation. She keeps her gaze fixed on the scattered pieces of her uniform as the pressure of Kashyk’s gloved hand forces her to hands and knees. As he positions himself behind her, his soldiers lean forward with breath drawn inward, sucking the air from the room. Sucking the breath from her lungs.  
  
She closes her eyes.  
  
He pierces her with force, but she’s already so wet that all she thinks, all she feels is _yes_ , and it’s just one more insult heaped on top of the banquet of them she’s already swallowed.  
  
Powerful thrusts drive her forward. She’s forced to drop to her elbows to keep her balance, curl her fingers into the carpet. The posture raises her hips and spreads her thighs, and one of Kashyk’s men stifles a laugh.  
  
She knows what she looks like.  
  
She knows what she is.  
  
He’s talking now. Much of what he’s saying is apparently too foreign, too vernacular to convert to Standard, but every so often the universal translator supplies _whore_ and _cunt_ and _mine_. It doesn’t matter; the words wash over her. Her skin is impermeable. There is nothing he can call her that she hasn’t been called before.  
  
He grasps her breast, squeezing, and she presses her lips against a wince. The other hand slides down her spine and comes to rest on her ass. She feels his thumb stroke between her cheeks and press into her. It hurts, and she whines, and she pushes against it, into it.  
  
Her insides are oozing black and red and black again and as he fucks her she welcomes it. He’s fucking the emptiness away.  
  
“Good,” he rasps, “so good,” and she feels him gush inside her.  
  
He pulls out and drags her upright, her back abraded against the buckles on his uniform front. His seed spills down her thighs and she imagines it mixing with the black tar inside her.  
  
His hand is between her legs now, stroking, curling.  
  
She turns her head to the side so she won’t see the leering faces of his men as Kashyk’s fingers pluck her into her own, shattering, shameful climax.  
  


* * *

  
  
_USS La Recherche, 2390_  
  
In three days she will see him again, and she’ll smile and shake his hand, and mouth all the platitudes expected of a decorated Starfleet admiral. She will wear dress uniform – white, pristine, unspoiled – and if her insides are coiled in red lust and black shame, she will never let him see.  
  
Ambassador Kashyk, diplomatic representative for the Devore Republic.  
  
The identity of the diplomat she’s meeting to finalise this treaty, if she’s honest with herself – and she tries to be, these days, she tries so hard – is no surprise.  
  
Kathryn tips her head against the back of the couch, closing her eyes. She tires more easily these days, a product, she supposes, both of advancing age and the injuries she has so recently recovered from. It’s late, and she feels the drag of weariness in her bones, but she doubts sleep will come easily tonight.  
  
_Can I do this?_ she forces herself to consider. _Can I walk into that room, sit beside that man, make polite conversation?_  
  
The answer is clear.  
  
_I have no choice._  
  
And perhaps, after all of the trials she’s weathered and borne thus far, this is her final test. Perhaps this – thrown in her face at a time when she’s finally learned to believe her destiny doesn’t have to be written in despair and disappointment – perhaps this is what she deserves.  
  


* * *

  
  
_San Francisco, 2359_  
  
_I deserve this_ , she thinks as he pushes her over the table. Before the pain curls into her – the careless grip of hands on her hips, the blunt nudge of his cock inside her – she braces for it, but when it comes it’s everything she wants.  
  
She craves it, needs it, embraces it.  
  
She turns her face to the side and her cheek scrapes against the splintered wood of the table’s surface with each thrust. When this is over she’ll need a dermal regenerator, she thinks. She can hide the finger-shaped bruises that will bloom beneath her clothing, can mask the limp she knows he’ll leave her with, but she can’t hide the abrasions to exposed and tender skin any more than she can hide the gaping wound where her soul used to be.  
  
He told her his name and she forgot it immediately, because she doesn’t want him for conversation. She doesn’t need him to buy her drinks or dance with her or ask about her favourite books. The only thing she wants from him is this, because this is the only thing that makes her feel alive.  
  
Even though, she knows, it’s slowly killing her.  
  
The whiskey they drank when he invited her up to his apartment spills over the surface of the kitchen table, pooling dark and sticky in the wood grain. She can smell it as he thrusts inside her, cloying, thick as the bile that rises in her throat.  
  
She breathes it in, lets it meet and mingle with the poison inside, seeping into her until she thinks she might drown in it. But she welcomes it, embraces it.  
  
It’s hot and thick and weighty, like her rage, and anything is better than drowning under the ice.  
  
The stranger embedded in her body grips her hips so hard she flinches, and she whimpers “harder.” When he reaches a hand around her throat she moans, and clenches, and comes.  
  
The last man who fucked her like this was her fiancé. But he can’t give her what she craves anymore, because he’s dead.  
  


* * *

  
  
_USS La Recherche, 2390_  
  
The padd slips from her lax fingers and she twitches, dragging her consciousness back from the clouded edge of sleep. It seems her body has developed a wisdom her troubled mind has forgotten. She’s grateful for the twinge in her bones, the reminder that sinking into old dreams here on this couch will only leave her aching, in body and in soul.  
  
Starlight spills dimly through the bedroom viewport, and she pauses in the doorway to let her eyes adjust. He’s already sleeping, arm flung over his head, chest rising and falling in even, shallow, dependable breaths.  
  
He has always been this, for her. Steadfast in an unpredictable world, her stalwart, her safe harbour. The times when she’s been least controlled, least certain of her path, have been the times she and Chakotay were at odds.  
  
And as she watches him now, the flicker of a hostile dream creasing his forehead, she feels the devastation of knowing that she has not been that for him.  
  
Kathryn drops her robe to the floor and eases between the sheets, and in sleep her husband turns toward her, his arm curling her close. Even in sleep his instinct is to reach for her, protect her, love her.  
  
She lies awake, listening to his soft even breaths.  
  
Were she a better person, she wouldn’t keep this from him. But so much of their life together has been defined by old wounds and unsaid words, and she doesn’t know whether full disclosure would be the glue that binds them together or the knife that finally, irrevocably, rends them apart.  
  


* * *

  
  
_USS Voyager, 2375_  
  
“Fuck me,” she rasps.  
  
The hands that grasp her hips are gloved in soft black leather, not scaled and grey, but they bruise her all the same and she welcomes it.  
  
This isn’t the way this night was supposed to go. She’s supposed to smile, retreat, maintain control. And she had every intention of playing her part, until Chakotay turned her down.  
  
So here she is now, stripped bare and cracked open, seeking the pain she knows she deserves. The pain she knows that this man is so amply skilled at giving her.  
  
She allows him to push her and pull her and work her body around him. He wrenches her arms behind her back and buries his hand in the short hair at the back of her neck, and she doesn’t try to hold back her pained, surrendering whine.  
  
If she takes her punishment, maybe she’ll be able to sleep tonight without dreaming.  
  
If she does her penance, maybe it will wash clean her sins.  
  
But she knows, deep in her scored and inadequate soul, that she will never be good enough for the man she loves.  
  


* * *

  
  
_USS La Recherche, 2390_  
  
The old hurt, the rage, wells up from under her ribs where she’s stored it all these years, and she rises up to straddle him, pinning his wrists to the pillow either side of his head. She leans in to bite his nipple and he jerks under her. His bewildered eyes, opening sharply onto hers, make her squeeze her own shut.  
  
She doesn’t want to see what she’s doing to him.  
  
“Kathryn, what –”  
  
She silences him with a kiss that speaks of lust and hate and ages-old anger. Her thighs tighten around his hips. She knows his body well, after all these years. She knows precisely how to move, where to touch him to coax him to full hardness.  
  
Not that it’s ever taken much.  
  
And in seconds he’s hot and swollen and she twists her hips, sinking onto him with a grimace. He groans and grabs her hips.  
  
“Easy,” he pleads, but she hisses impatience and works around him, against him. When he reaches up to touch her face she jerks away, brings his seeking hand to her throat and clasps his fingers around it.  
  
He’s no stranger to her needs – and he’s never been reluctant to give into them – but tonight his touch is too gentle, too respectful. She leans into his hand around her neck, arching to show him what she wants. But the hesitation in his grasp is mirrored by the doubt in his eyes.  
  
She hisses her displeasure, shoves his hands away, leans down to sink her teeth into his lower lip.  
  
She draws blood.  
  
It’s the sight of it staining her teeth that changes the look in his eyes. They’re hard now, his mouth flattened into a line. His hand comes back to her throat, clamps tight, and she gasps, strains, “ _yes_.”  
  
“All right, Kathryn,” his voice is as coarse as hers, “if that’s the way you want it,” and he leans up, wraps his other arm around her waist and jerks her hips against him.  
  
It’s rough, and it causes her to wince; they haven’t fucked like this since before her injury and her body is no longer as pliant, as accommodating, as used to this as once it was. But it’s pain she wants, and it’s pain she takes as her due.  
  
He thrusts and lunges and she arches and gasps, and it doesn’t take long before her head is singing from lack of breath, her body shaking as the rush of light and sensation beats back the blackness inside her. She slumps against him, sated and quivering and blissfully, thankfully numb.  
  
In his eyes, when she looks again, there are tears.  
  


* * *

  
  
_Starbase 54, 2359_  
  
“Crazy fucking bitch,” the man hisses, fingers pressed to his split lip, and Kathryn, drunk and angry and careless, laughs in his face.  
  
There’s nothing he can call her, nothing he can say to hurt her any worse than she’s already hurting.  
  
There’s nothing he can do for her except fuck her emptiness away.  
  
“Gonna show me who’s boss?” she jeers, standing her ground. Her hair falls over one eye and she plants her hands on her hips. Her mouth is twisted, her chest thrust out.  
  
She licks her lips and tastes his blood.  
  
The stranger unbuckles his belt and steps forward, snatching her shoulder and spinning her into the wall of the bathroom stall. His hand searches for the hem of her skirt, yanks it upward. Her palms flatten against the wall either side of her face and she raises her hips.  
  
He kicks her legs apart, bends his knees, drives into her.  
  
Yes, she thinks as he clamps one arm around her waist to hold her to him. His other hand curls around her throat, fingers digging, compressing her windpipe. Her heels scrape on the tiles, her tortured breathing echoing above the low pulsing beat that’s so much louder out on the club floor.  
  
“This what you want?” he grunts into her ear.  
  
It’s been months since Justin died, but there’s still a pale band on her finger where her ring used to be. She curls her hand into a fist.  
  
“You like this?” he lunges into her. “Getting fucked like a bitch in heat?”  
  
_Stop talking_ , she thinks but can’t say around the hand squeezing her neck. Her vision begins to blur, dark streaks tunnelling inward.  
  
She thinks about Cardassians, and countless faceless men, and Owen Paris, and if she had the breath for it, she’d sob.  
  
Instead she reaches down to rub herself. She wants, needs, to come, and if he’d just shut up –  
  
“Get your fucking hand away,” and he slaps it – actually slaps her hand away from her clitoris. Her eyes go wide and she tries to pry his fingers from around her throat.  
  
He squeezes tighter.  
  
Fear prickles ice water down her spine. She struggles to breathe, tries to kick out at him, but he’s too strong and his grip too solid. A plea rasps in her throat. The singing in her ears drowns out the words he hisses and all she can see now is the blood-red haze across her eyes.  
  
His thrusts into her twisting, flailing body increase in pace and power, and the last of her breath dies in her lungs, her vision going dark.  
  
When she wakes she’s alone and lying on the cold, tiled floor.  
  
It takes her several minutes to re-orient herself, to manoeuvre herself upright on shaking legs, to tug down her skirt and push the hair out of her eyes. She runs trembling hands under the faucet and meets her own eyes in the mirror.  
  
She’s not surprised to find a stranger staring back at her.  
  


* * *

  
  
_USS La Recherche, 2390_  
  
Chakotay has fallen back into a troubled, restless sleep, but Kathryn’s conscience, and her heart, are too heavy to bear.  
  
She pulls on a robe and returns to the living area.  
  
“Coffee, black.”  
  
Kathryn pulls her feet beneath her on the couch, cradling the cup in cold hands as the Devoran stars streak past the viewport.  
  
She’d sworn off picking up strangers after that night on Starbase 54. Waking up alone with the marks of his hands livid around her neck, she’d finally understood that even though she was afraid to live, she didn’t want to die.  
  
There were other men after that – men she knew; superior officers and friends of friends – and the holoprograms she’d bought from a shady Ferengi on Deep Space Four, but she worked hard on her pristine veneer and kept her Starfleet record clean. At least until a series of random malfunctions exposed her proclivities in a holodeck on Risa. Caught, reprimanded and counselled, she’d fled back to Mark, the childhood friend who had loved her so patiently and for so long.  
  
And for a long time, he was enough. She deleted the holoprograms, moved in with Mark, avoided other men. She worked hard to become known for her virtue and her ambition, and in pretending, she became.  
  
Until the Delta quadrant, which became at once her prison and her salvation.  
  
It’s ironic, she thinks now as the steam curls delicately up from her coffee, that the peace she’s worked so hard to find – and to give – since the end of that seven-year nightmare is crumbling under the weight of their return to this quadrant of space.  
  
She doesn’t want to lose this. This hard-won peace is her bedrock, and the promise of their lake house is her reason for living. It’s her redemption, and her happiness, and the future that she binds onto her finger in the shape of a plain gold ring.  
  
She doesn’t want to be that woman again – that disastrous, drunken woman with her red lipstick and her dark shadows and her emptiness. That woman who sought pain as her refuge and saw a stranger when she looked in the mirror.  
  
She doesn’t want to _want_ this.  
  
And she wonders how much more she can bear.


	2. Required to Bear

“Yet it would be your duty to bear it, if you could not avoid it: it is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required to bear.”  
-    Charlotte Brontë, _Jane Eyre_

* * *

  
  
_Indiana, 2358_  
  
The bed creaks in time with their movements. She giggles and he shushes her, dark-blue eyes sparking with want and delight as he moves above her.  
  
“You want your father to bust in on us?” Justin admonishes her, grinning.  
  
_He needs a haircut_ , she thinks as she reaches up to run a hand through the dark silky strands that fall over his forehead. Justin turns his face into her touch as he thrusts slowly, easily, and Kathryn lets her breath out on a pleasured sigh.  
  
It’s not always like this, of course – vanilla-sweet and honey-slow. They both have their demons and the need to exorcise them; it’s what binds them together. But tonight – in her cramped childhood bed, under her father’s roof – this is what they need, and this is what they are.  
  
“Kathryn,” he murmurs, and at the tenderness in his eyes she cranes up to kiss him, wrapping her arms around his narrow, scarred torso.  
  
“I love you,” she breathes as she comes. “I love you so much. Don’t ever leave me.”  
  
“I promise,” says Justin.  
  
Later, curled against each other sticky and sated, he draws lazy patterns on her back with his fingertips.  
  
“Do you think your father approves of me?”  
  
“Of course he does,” she mumbles drowsily. “He requested you for the test flight, didn’t he?”  
  
Justin shrugs, his shoulder sharp against her cheek, and she raises her head.  
  
“What’s wrong?”  
  
Dark-blue eyes dart away. “I wasn’t asking about the shuttle test.”  
  
Kathryn props herself on her elbow, clutching the sheet to her naked chest. Her fiancé’s gaze is unreadable when he locks it on hers. She hates how he does that.  
  
“Talk to me,” she demands.  
  
“I don’t deserve you,” he admits. “And I think your father knows it.”  
  
Fear clutches at her heart. “My father knows nothing about me,” she says. “You’re the only one who understands.”  
  
Justin’s eyes soften.  
  
“You know what I think?” Kathryn lets the cadence of her voice dip lower as she trails the tip of her finger over the beloved contours of his face: the raised bump on the bridge of his nose, the broad Slavic cheekbones, the thin lips and sharp jaw. “I think we should blow off the wedding plans and elope to Risa.”  
  
His mouth curves slightly.  
  
She lets the sheet drop and leans down to kiss him, lush and unhurried. His hands come up, one sliding into her hair, the other cradling her face as though she is something immeasurably precious, like loyalty, like love.  
  
“The day after tomorrow,” he murmurs as she breaks the kiss to rest her forehead against his, “after the test flight, we’ll go to Risa.”  
  
She arches against him in sinuous delight, and as he rolls her under him, the press of his hips spreading her thighs, she wonders what she ever did to deserve this happiness.

* * *

  
  
_USS La Recherche, 2390_  
  
The silence between them has been heavy since three nights ago, since she brought her disastrous appetites into their bed. A transgression she’d compounded the night before, when she stripped before him and husked “fuck me,” turning away from his grim mouth and empty eyes.  
  
She knows he feels the wrongness and she doesn’t know how to make it right.  
  
Kathryn wraps the blanket tighter around her shoulders, curling up on the couch. Her body feels used and sore, and the stars of the Devore Imperium are colder, crueller somehow than even the stars of Cardassia or Tau Ceti Prime. She’s always believed that as you grow older things stop hurting you so deeply. She sees now that this is a fallacy.  
  
It is 0530 on the day of the treaty signing, and she’s been awake for hours – drinking small bitter cups of coffee and listening to music that should be soothing but is not – while Chakotay sleeps on.  
  
She holds up her left hand, spreads her fingers against the stars outside the viewport. Her wedding ring, plain and unembellished, glints faintly in the half-light. Honest, she thinks. Like the man who gave it to her. Like she has tried to be.  
  
The agreement between them – no less binding for being unspoken – has always been that he would indulge her darker proclivities whenever she needs it, but never in their bedroom. Never in the place where they are just Kathryn and Chakotay, husband and wife, lovers, partners, impenetrable and true.  
  
She regrets nothing in her life as his lover so much as she regrets bringing her own corruption into their bed.  
  
She twists the ring on her finger and thinks about Cardassians, about pain that never ended and screaming until her voice cracked. About fractured ice and Justin and broken promises. About leather and whiskey and pleasure that bleeds into pain. About all the tiny knife-cuts of the choices she’s made that have brought her here, to this moment.  
  
And about the one good, pure, dependable person in her life, and all that she’s compelled him to bear.

* * *

  
  
_USS Voyager, 2375_  
  
She returns to her bridge and takes her seat without the faintest flicker of a grimace.  
  
“The Devore ships have gone,” Ayala reports from Tactical. “The ship is secure.”  
  
“All speed ahead, Mr Paris.”  
  
Her throat is raw and aching from the bruising pressure of Kashyk’s hands around it, but there’s no sign of it in her voice.  
  
“… transporter suspension?”  
  
“What?” she turns to Chakotay. “What did you say?”  
  
“I asked if we should retrieve the telepaths from transporter suspension,” he answers, his brow creasing. “Captain, are you all right?”  
  
She averts her eyes from the worried compassion in his. She doesn’t want or deserve his compassion.  
  
“Fine. Take care of it, Commander.”  
  
Tom turns to glance at her from the helm.  
  
Her world lurches.  
  
_They know. Oh, God, they all know._  
  
The black bile rises inside her and she wants to run. Tear off her pips, escape in a shuttle, disappear into the empty space between stars so that she’ll never have to witness that terrifying comprehension in the eyes of her crew.  
  
“You have the bridge, Commander,” she manages to breathe. “I’ll be in my ready –”  
  
_God, no. Not there._  
  
“– in the cargo bay.”  
  
She feels the eyes of her bridge crew watching, watching, as she pushes her bruised and aching body upright. It seems impossible, but she manages to wait until the turbolift doors have closed around her before she falls to her knees, retching.

* * *

  
  
_USS La Recherche, 2390_  
  
She is dressed by the time Chakotay emerges from their bedroom, sleepy-eyed and salt-and-pepper hair her fingers itch to comb through.  
  
“Good morning,” she greets him, her treacherous lips pressing lightly to his cheek. “I’m going to check over the away team protocols with Harry.”  
  
He reaches for her but she sidles away. “Kathryn,” he says, voice still gruff-edged with sleep, “wait a minute.”  
  
“No time,” she breezes, collecting her padd on her way to the door. She turns back to smile at him – bright, complicit – and chides gently, “You overslept. Your dress uniform is in the closet – make sure you’re ready by the time I’m back.”  
  
As she strides into the corridor, expressionless, her right hand drifts to touch the empty space on her left ring finger.

* * *

  
  
_Starfleet Medical, 2358_  
  
When she woke in the medical bay on the _Dawnbreaker_ after her rescue from the Cardassian prison, her world was patterned in black and red, and everything was pain.  
  
This time, everything is white, and she feels nothing at all.  
  
She thinks for a moment that she is still on the ice planet, and the notion is a comfort. If she’s there, she still has a chance. She can still save them, if only she’s quick enough, smart enough. Strong enough.  
  
But when she shifts her left arm she feels the harsh pull of intravenous tubes. Blinking against the white – it’s so bright, it stings her eyes – she turns her head to look. She spreads her fingers and sees the empty space where her engagement ring should be.  
  
It slipped off her finger, she remembers, and supposes it’s sunk beneath thick sheets of ice, crystallised like her father and her fiancé and the hopes she’d barely begun to cherish.  
  
There’s something beautiful about it, she thinks idly – something heroic in their entombment, forever mourned and forever perfect. They will never suffer the untidy grief of a survivor.  
  
She wonders what kind of person it makes her, that she envies them.  
  
But then, she already knows what she is.  
  
For long months she closes her eyes. Her world is narrowed to her childhood bed and four white walls. She sleeps, and when she can’t sleep she hums to drown out her memories. Eventually, even those stop plaguing her.  
  
She thinks she could be content to live like this, if it’s not her fate to die.

* * *

  
  
_USS La Recherche, 2390_  
  
Kathryn finishes her discussion with Commander Kim and finds she doesn’t want to go back to her quarters.  
  
_La Recherche_ has an arboretum – an extravagance, she thinks, for a ship smaller than _Voyager_ , although she supposes it makes sense on a vessel designed for deep-space science missions – and she’s pleased to find it empty. She drifts beneath an American maple and props her back against its trunk. The branches swoop around her, embracing her in a panoply of auburn and red and gold.  
  
At their lake house, right now, the maples would look just like this.  
  
She thinks about the hard road she and Chakotay have journeyed to get here and the road they have yet to travel.  
  
Five years ago she almost lost him. He’d taken the newly overhauled _Voyager_ out on a joyride with a skeleton crew, an easy loop to Alpha Centauri and back again. There was an accident – a genuine one; a calamitous series of unforeseeable events – and the ship was almost destroyed. They lost four people, and Chakotay was so badly injured that for days no doctor would offer a prognosis.  
  
They’d taken her to see him when he came out of the first round of surgery. For long minutes she had stared at her husband, still and pale as death, his body immobilised in a prison of tubes and wires. Then she had walked out of Starfleet Medical and refused to return until the doctors told her he was awake and asking for her.  
  
She could not – _could not_ – watch him die.  
  
Remembering this, now, Kathryn tilts her head back against the maple’s trunk and closes her eyes against the familiar knife-ache of guilt.  
  
How often has he kept vigil by her bedside, waiting to lose her? How often has she flung herself recklessly in harm’s way, gambling both her future and his?  
  
How different is that – forcing him to suffer the destruction of her body and fear the loss of her life – from what she’s doing to him now?  
  
How many chances will she get before she loses him anyway?

* * *

  
  
_USS Voyager, 2375_  
  
Kashyk says, “The bridge is yours,” as though it’s a benediction and not the last, petty twist of an impotent knife, but she allows him it.  
  
She has, after all, won.  
  
Her gaze is still fixed on the carpet at her feet when Chakotay comes to kneel beside her.  
  
“Report,” she orders, throat raw.  
  
“The Devore vessels have gone. The ship is secure.”  
  
“Call all crew to return to their duty stations.”  
  
“Including the captain?” He tips his head toward her empty chair.  
  
Kathryn isn’t sure that she can ever bear to sit in it again.  
  
She thinks of Kashyk, of scouring her thighs in the sonic shower and evading her own reflection.  
  
She thinks of scaled hide and faceless men and holograms and rope burns on her wrists. She thinks of vanilla and whiskey and Justin’s dark-blue, wounded eyes. She thinks of Mark, and his tender words and unselfish love, and of knowing it would never be enough.  
  
She thinks of Chakotay, his hands sure and gentle, erasing the evidence of gloved fingers on her skin. Of the way he looks at her as though she’s something precious, like loyalty. Like love.  
  
She wants to run.

But she is the captain, and so she glides gracefully to her own chair as though she’s never been forcibly removed from it, and her voice is even as she calls her crew to return to their stations.

* * *

  
  
_Ambassadorial Palace of the Devore Republic, 2390_  
  
Her stomach tightens like a fist as she is led toward the dance floor – a lamb to the slaughter – and moves into Kashyk’s arms. His hands are bare, but as they cradle her own she feels the texture of leather.  
  
_I am Admiral Kathryn Janeway_ , she forces through the gritty clouds of memory, _and I will not give into fear_.  
  
She wishes, not for the first time, that she hadn’t sent Chakotay back to the ship. But this is a hell of her own making, and he cannot save her from it.  
  
The dance ends and Kashyk ushers her toward the room where she will sign the Federation into a damnable treaty, one that he expects her to seal with her own flesh.  
  
As if she is a prize.  
  
The door is secured behind them and she stands alone in this room with the man who – like so many, many others – has cast his stain across her marriage. He leans into her, his voice curdling like cream. His words are sly, and crudely intimate. They are meant to goad her.  
  
This time she won’t let them.  
  
He has no power over her anymore. She is not Starfleet’s chess piece, or a gul’s plaything, or Kashyk’s sacrificial offering.  
  
She, at last, understands her worth. She is Kathryn Janeway, and she is precious. She is loyal and she is loved.  
  
And she’s finally free.

 


	3. The Master of her Fate

 “It matters not how strait the gate,  
How charged with punishments the scroll,  
I am the master of my fate:  
I am the captain of my soul.”  
-    William Ernest Henley, _Echoes of Life and Death_

* * *

  
  
_USS La Recherche, 2390_  
  
Starlight gleams faintly on the gold band that encircles her finger.  
  
“Morning,” mumbles the sleep-roughened voice she loves beyond reason.  
  
Kathryn relaxes her splayed fingers and lets her hand drift downward, and it comes to rest on the warm arm that’s wrapped around her waist.  
  
“Good morning,” she murmurs. She tilts her head to nuzzle at the soft skin of his throat and feels his answering rumble of satisfaction along her spine.  
  
They shift and fit themselves together like well-worn puzzle pieces. Her head is tucked under his chin, her ear pressed to his faithful heart, his arms cradling her. She watches the Devoran stars slip by, each one a marker on their final journey home.  
  
Peace fills the room, weighty and golden, and as Chakotay’s lips press into her hair, Kathryn smiles.

 

* * *

  
  
_San Francisco, 2365_  
  
The apartment still feels empty, even though she’s tried to fill it with books and rugs and paintings, and ornaments that Mark is bemused by. She tells herself it’s a product of the white walls and high ceilings and nothing to do with the hard coal of panic wedged between her ribs.  
  
She does like the bedroom, though, with its picture windows that face south-east over the bay. In the mornings she wakes to sunlight and the faint splash of oars. In those first, half-waking moments she can almost imagine that nothing bad could ever happen to her.  
  
This morning she’s alone in the bed. Pulling on the t-shirt Mark has left on the floor, she pushes her mussed hair out of her face and moves on autopilot to the kitchen for her first cup of coffee.  
  
“Good morning, sleepyhead.”  
  
Kathryn chokes on her coffee. “Damn it, Mark, I didn’t know you were there.”  
  
Mark puts down his stylus – he prefers a pen and paper; it’s one of the peccadilloes she teases him about but secretly enjoys – and scrapes his chair back from the table, coming over to wrap his arms around her from behind.  
  
“Where else would I be, Kath?” he nuzzles into the side of her neck.  
  
God, how she hates it – this diminutive of her name that she quite illogically feels diminishes her as a person. But she accepts it all the same, because this is who she is now. Kath, lover of Mark, this kind, gentle, easy-going man who loves her in spite of the things she keeps hidden. Perhaps, partly, because of them.  
  
And she loves him too – she does. It’s a safe love, secure and undemanding, and right now it’s exactly what she needs.  
  
She eases out of his arms, turning to smile at him to soften the gesture. “What are you up to today?”  
  
Mark moves to the replicator and calls up poached eggs without asking her preference, motioning her to sit at the table. “We have lunch at my mother’s,” he reminds her, taking the seat opposite.  
  
“Oh Mark, I can’t,” she bites her lip. “I have a lot of work to do today.”  
  
“Kath, it’s Saturday.” His voice is patient; this is not a new conversation for them. “Even Starfleet doesn’t expect you to work twenty-four-seven.”  
  
“I’m meeting with the board of admirals next week.” Her knife scrapes discordantly on the plate. “I think they’re going to offer me a command.”  
  
“That’s great!” Mark’s eyes light up. “So let’s celebrate, huh?”  
  
“Don’t jump the gun,” she warns, but smiles. “For all I know, they could be planning to haul me over the coals again.”  
  
“What happened on the _Billings_ was not your fault.” He rises and comes over to rest his hands on her shoulders. “You need to stop beating yourself up over it, Kath.”  
  
Appetite gone, she leans back and lets him knead gently at the ever-present knots in her shoulders. She wants to protest – it was her fault, it always is – but it’s an old argument, and she’s tired of it.  
  
“So,” he bends to murmur in her ear, “why don’t you take the day off? We have hours until we’re due at my mom’s, and I have an idea of how we can kill some time.”  
  
He bites lightly at her earlobe and she shivers. “Oh you do, do you?” she purrs, voice low and sultry.  
  
“I do.” Mark takes her hand and tugs her to her feet. As she tiptoes up to kiss him he slides his hands under her ass and lifts her, and she laughs, wrapping her legs around his hips as he carries her back to bed.

* * *

  
  
_USS La Recherche, 2390_  
  
“Come back to bed,” Chakotay calls softly from the bedroom doorway, and Kathryn looks over from her curled-up position on the couch.  
  
“I have work to do,” she feigns reluctance. “I need to send Command a report on my failure to sign the treaty.”  
  
Chakotay comes over, rubbing a hand through his hair. “It was hardly your failure, Kathryn.”  
  
“I’m not sure they’ll see it that way.”  
  
“If they knew the price of signing, they would.” He crouches beside her, fingers entangling with hers. “And I for one am glad you didn’t pay it.”  
  
“Come here,” she beckons him, pulling him up beside her so she can slide onto his lap. His hands, so warm and gentle, cup her hips as she presses her lips along the stubbled line of his jaw. “I love you,” she murmurs. “So much.”  
  
In answer he spreads his hands across her back, kissing her with such familiar tenderness that her lips curve into a smile under his.  
  
“Didn’t you mention something about bed?” she whispers as his hands begin to travel.  
  
He scoops an arm under her knees and rises in one smooth and easy movement. Kathryn nestles her face into his neck as he carries her to their bed. His pulse beats under her cheek, as steady and dependable as he is.  
  
There is nothing that compares to the feeling of being held in his arms, safe and cherished, or the reverent way he touches her, as though he’s breathing life back into her. Warming her, like ice melting under his fingertips.  
  
“I never thought I was good enough for you,” she admits later, quietly, tracing meaningless patterns on his bare chest.  
  
“Why would you think that?”  
  
“Because you’re a good person,” she says. “And I believed that at the core, I was rotten.”  
  
She feels the reflexive tightening of his arms around her: protecting her, always, even from herself.  
  
“Kathryn,” he hesitates, “bad things happen to good people. It doesn’t make you bad, too.”  
  
It’s the closest he’s come to telling her he knows what happened to her. What she’s done.  
  
_After a few, I stopped screaming_ , she thinks. _But that doesn’t mean I stopped fighting_.  
  
“And now?” he asks. “What do you believe now?”  
  
“Well,” Kathryn smiles, “if someone as good as you can love me, I can’t be all that bad, can I?”

 

* * *

  
  
_Paris, 2370_  
  
It is one of the rare times when their worlds collide. Mark has been invited to take part in a think tank in the Quartier Latin, and Kathryn is at Starfleet’s Paris campus to discuss fleet movements near the newly formed Demilitarised Zone.  
  
She doesn’t know, until Mark’s symposium is three days in, that its topics include the impact of systematic racial sublimation, the psychology behind guerrilla warfare and the efficacy of torture.  
  
Over dinner at a tiny, quaint café on the Rue Mignon, Mark talks about the facilitator at that afternoon’s session, a Federation doctor who’s been working at a colony bordering the DMZ. “She says the planet has seen an influx of refugees since the Federation agreed to cede their home worlds to the Cardassians,” he informs her as she picks at her salad. “She’s heard stories of mass murder, imprisonment, rape and torture. These people are suffering because of that damned treaty … Kath, are you listening?”  
  
“You know I can’t talk about this, Mark.”  
  
“Why?” Mark rarely pushes an argument with her – especially when it comes to Starfleet matters – but now he puts down his fork and looks at her evenly. “Because it’s classified, or because it hits too close to home?”  
  
Kathryn’s shoulders tense, and her fiancé reaches across the table to take her unresisting hand.  
  
“You, of all people,” he says gently, “must empathise with these refugees.”  
  
She yanks her hand away, glaring. “Whatever you’re getting at, I suggest you drop it.”  
  
“I’m sorry,” he says after a beat of silence. “It’s just that I feel for these people, Kath, and in your position surely there’s something you can do.”  
  
“What?” She keeps her voice low, mindful of the other café patrons. “What would you have me do? I’ve already made an appeal to Command to reconsider the terms of the treaty…” She shuts her mouth abruptly. “There’s nothing more I can say.”  
  
She evades his too-searching gaze as she recalls that meeting with Admiral Nechayev. _You can’t just let the Cardassians run these people off their home worlds_ , she’d insisted, and Nechayev had stared her down and replied, _It’s not your concern, Captain_.  
  
“Other Starfleet officers are speaking out against it,” Mark presses. “Some are even resigning in protest. You must’ve heard of the Maquis movement. There are reports that six officers have defected in the last week –”  
  
“What do you want from me, Mark?” she snaps. “You want me to resign my commission, give up my Federation citizenship? Should I run off to fight the good fight against the Cardassians – who by the way are our _allies_ – and die in a blaze of glory?”  
  
Mark compresses his lips. “Of course I don’t want that,” he spaces his words evenly. “I don’t want to lose you.”  
  
“Then I suggest you change the subject right now.” Kathryn scrapes back her chair. “Excuse me.”  
  
She winds her way through tables and into the ladies’ room, the door swinging shut behind her. Casting a cursory glance around and finding herself blessedly alone, she lurches into a stall and locks herself in, breathing, _in, out_ , until her hands stop shaking.  
  
As her heart slows, she recognises that Mark’s comments are not the accusations she took them to be. He’s affected, profoundly, by what he’s recently learned. He is a philosopher and a humanitarian; it’s in his nature to want to know, to understand how one sentient race can treat another so shamefully. Even if he can’t possibly understand, because he’s never been their victim.  
  
She, on the other hand, has known this day would come since the signing of the treaty. Since the first reports of unrest on the Cardassian border three years ago. Since her own stay as a guest of the Cardassians more than a decade before.  
  
And she still doesn’t know what to do about it.  
  
“I’m sorry,” she says quietly when she’s returned to the table. “You just … struck a nerve.”  
  
“It’s my fault for bringing it up, Kath.” Mark attempts a smile. “After all these years I should know better.”  
  
She sips her wine, avoiding his eye.  
  
“I just wish you trusted me enough to tell me what happened to you,” he almost mumbles, but when she doesn’t respond, he picks up his knife and fork and returns, listlessly, to his dinner.

 

* * *

  
  
_USS La Recherche, 2390_  
  
“Kathryn.”  
  
She turns to find Chakotay crouched beside her, a steaming mug held out in one hand.  
  
“That’s not coffee,” she musters up a smile.  
  
“Hot chocolate.” He sits next to her and wraps her hands around the mug, waiting until she sips gratefully before he continues gently, “Are you ready to talk to me yet?”  
  
She sighs. “I’m sorry, I know I’ve been shutting you out. I have a lot on my mind, I guess.”  
  
“You really think Kashyk is following us?”  
  
“I don’t know.” Kathryn puts down the mug and rubs her aching temples. “He had every chance to get to me on Devore. I’m sure it’s all in my imagination.”  
  
“Kathryn, look at me.” Chakotay rests a hand on her knee. “I’ve got Harry scanning every micron of space, shields are at full strength, and Devore ships can’t catch us at slipstream. We’re well beyond their range now. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”  
  
“And if he does come after me?” she asks, wondering why now – now that she’s safe, beyond his reach – she can’t stop flinching at shadows. “What then?”  
  
“Then I’ll kill him,” says Chakotay.  
  
She believes him.  
  
“You can’t kill all my nightmares,” she whispers. “You can’t erase the things I can’t forget.”  
  
“Like what?” he queries, gently taking her hands.  
  
Instead of answering directly, she turns her face to the stars again. “When I came after the _Val Jean_ twenty years ago, I had no idea what I’d do if I found you. Make sure Tuvok was safe, obviously, but apart from that…”  
  
She sighs.  
  
“Owen Paris ordered me on that mission as a test of my loyalty.” She feels Chakotay tense at Paris’ name and lays a hand over his. “But I went to prove to myself that I could handle it. Nobody had more sympathy for the Maquis than I did, Chakotay, but my duty was to Starfleet. It was my obligation to uphold that peace treaty, even if it meant siding with the Cardassians. I told myself it was the price of peace.”  
  
“The same price you were willing to pay on Devore.” Chakotay presses his lips together. “Sometimes, Kathryn, the price is too high.”  
  
“Spoken like a true rebel.” Her lips curve and starlight spills across her cheeks as she turns to face him.  
  
“Maybe,” he allows. “Or maybe I just wish you valued yourself as much as I do.”  
  
“I’m learning,” Kathryn says, and moves into his arms.

* * *

  
  
_USS Voyager, 2375_  
  
They are three sectors away from the Devore Imperium before Kathryn finds her courage for the conversation she knows they need to have.  
  
Chakotay answers his door and steps back to allow her entry into his quarters. She moves over to the viewport, arms wrapped around her body as she watches the stars at warp, each one a marker of their passage away from leather and lust and deception. Their passage home.  
  
She feels him behind her. When she turns, he’s watching her with eyes that speak of patience and regret. Kathryn’s breath catches.  
  
“Why are you here?” he asks softly.  
  
She swallows. “To thank you. For standing by me.”  
  
It’s a long moment before he steps back, moving over to the couch. He leans back in his seat, hooking one ankle over the opposite knee. Kathryn sits beside him, her body stiff, not too close.  
  
“You have nothing to thank me for, Kathryn.” He sounds exhausted, and she wonders if he’s been sleeping as badly as she has. She wonders if it’s for the same reasons.  
  
“I wish –” she almost bites off her tongue to halt the words that want to spill. Harmful, shameful, useless words.  
  
“What?” he asks.  
  
_I wish things were different_ , she thinks, _that I was different. I wish we’d built that boat and sailed down the river. I wish I’d kissed you that night on the holodeck, made love with you before the slipstream flight. I wish we were home, and that everything was going to be okay_.  
  
Kathryn shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter.”  
  
This was a bad idea, she realises. This is not a conversation they need to have at all. Not if its only purpose is to assuage her conscience. Not at his expense.  
  
She stands. “It’s late. Good night, Chakotay.”  
  
“Kathryn,” he calls as she moves toward the door, and despite herself she pauses long enough for him to say quietly, “You’re welcome.”

* * *

  
  
_USS La Recherche, 2390_  
  
“What’s that you’re looking at?”  
  
Kathryn smiles as Chakotay leans over her shoulder. “Just some plans.”  
  
She watches him squint at the display on her monitor. “Is that –?”  
  
“Ah, so you do recognise it.”  
  
Chakotay eases into the chair beside her. “It’s not something I’d forget. All these years,” he muses, “and I never did build us that boat.”  
  
“Well, now you can,” she murmurs, “although actually, I was thinking we could build it together.”  
  
He slings an arm around her waist, pulling her close. “We can start as soon as we get home.”  
  
“Home,” she echoes, resting her head on his shoulder. “I can’t wait.”

* * *

  
_Deep Space Nine, 2371_  
  
“… invited to a conference on Betazed, but it conflicts with the last few weeks of my tenure at the university, so I’ll probably turn it down …”  
  
“Uh-huh,” she says absently.  
  
“… although I’ve been considering the offer from – Kath? Have you heard a word I’ve said?”  
  
She stops shuffling padds and snaps her attention back to the image on her monitor. “Oh Mark, I’m sorry. I’ve just got so much to do before we head to the Badlands, and some of my crew haven’t checked in yet…”  
  
“Say no more.” He smiles at her.  
  
“Thanks,” she says gratefully, touching her fingers briefly to his image.  
  
“I’ll leave you to it. But Kath, promise me one thing?”  
  
“Of course,” she mumbles, attention caught by the flashing light on her console. “Mark, I’ve got an incoming message – what is it?”  
  
“Marry me.”  
  
She quirks an eyebrow at him. “As I recall, you’ve already asked me that, and I said yes two years ago.”  
  
“No, Kath.” He leans in, eyes unusually intense. “Marry me when you get back from your mission. When you come home.”  
  
“Oh,” she says, and the small black coal of dread wedges under her ribs.  
  
“I love you,” he emphasises, “and I don’t want to wait anymore to call you my wife.”  
  
Kathryn swallows.  
  
“At least think about it while you’re gone, okay?” Mark runs a hand through his hair and sighs. “And comm me before you leave DS9.”  
  
She nods. “I will … of course I will.”  
  
“Safe travels,” he says. “See you in three weeks.”  
  
“Bye,” she answers faintly, and his image disappears. She stares blankly at the screen until the insistently flashing light reminds her of her duty.  
  
But all through Admiral Paris’ report on the latest Maquis movements, she thinks about Mark, and about the way she’s evaded every conversation he’s ever tried to have about setting a wedding date. And she thinks about their apartment in the market district and how it still feels empty to her, even after five years. Even though Mark calls it home.

* * *

  
  
_Davis Lake, Oregon, 2391_  
  
The maple trees are just barely starting to bud and snow is still scattered across the path, but the lake house is even more beautiful than she remembers it.  
  
“I wish we'd been here for the tomatoes,” Kathryn murmurs, breath puffing clouds in the icy air.  
  
Chakotay unhooks her arm from his elbow, digging into the pocket of his greatcoat for the key. “We’ll plant more in summer.”  
  
She grins up at him as he fits the old-fashioned key into the door. “We’ll have plenty of summers.”  
  
Chakotay pushes open the door and drops his shoulder bag, and Kathryn shrieks in surprise as he swings her up into his arms.  
  
“What are you doing?” she laughs.  
  
“I’m carrying my bride over the threshold.” His answering smile scores his dimples deep.  
  
“A little late, isn’t it?” Kathryn’s eyebrow quirks. “Unless I was imagining that wedding we had, what, twelve years ago?”  
  
“It’s never too late,” he assures her dramatically, and steps into the house.  
  
It’s dark, and he stumbles and knocks her ankles against a coat rack, and she giggles and winds her arms around his neck. “Computer, lights,” she calls. “And activate the heating system. Set at twenty-two degrees Celsius.”  
  
Chakotay looks at her in mock chagrin. “I thought you said this house was hundreds of years old.”  
  
Kathryn shrugs airily. “So I added a few modern comforts.”  
  
He lets her slide down to her feet and bends to kiss her. By the time they pull apart she’s warmed through, even though the house is still cool.  
  
“Welcome home, Kathryn,” Chakotay says, and she laughs in delight, craning up to kiss him again.


End file.
